This week the pilot teachers and students are testing our partial alpha build. On the 1st it will be open to the general public for testing (under a different moodle course so we don’t mix the student testing data with the public data). We reviewed Moodle functionality, what information it logs, and the graphical improvements we have made to the text for the players.

KSB3 (The Snowshoe Race) should be updated again in the morning so the team can play through the changes made. We talked about plans for the internal test in March. Our goal is to have the snowboard freeplay part ready to play then, as well as KSB 2 (Labyrinth of Heat).

We chatted about some details for KSB 4 and its Physical Modeling Curriculum, and then talked about some of the proposed KSB 4 ideas in gameplay. It’s always a struggle for us when designing these things because all of the KSBs are there for the purpose of teaching the player enough so he or she can succeed in the multiplayer portion. Since we don’t have the multiplayer physical modeling curriculum fully fleshed out, it’s been especially difficult for us to know what information to include in KSB 4 and what gameplay would support our learning objectives.

In the past we have questioned the necessity of including KSB 4 but ultimately concluded that it would be important to have since it goes over information the other 3 KSBs do not. The other KSBs also did not relate as directly to the multiplayer portion, so those designs went (relatively) smoothly. Since we’re a bit stuck at the moment, we’ve decided to postpone returning to KSB4 and the multiplayer until sometime in March. Hopefully by then we’ll have more information on the Physical Modeling curriculum and how to better incorporate that into KSB 4.

Throughout our discussion we kept getting strange feedback/static on the call, probably from computer speakers or a bluetooth headset. Ah, the quirks of having meetings over the phone. Our next meeting will focus exclusively on the March playtest, and once the February playtest goes public we can publish the details here. Keep an eye out for a post next week about it!